August 18, 2000

Of Flames, Fan Mail, and Software That Can Tell the Difference

By ELLEN SPERTUS

The information revolution has brought a new literary form: flames, or abusive electronic mail. As a researcher in information retrieval and classification, I analyzed 1,222 messages sent to the operators of controversial political sites on the World Wide Web in order to develop software to identify, and optionally filter out, messages that recipients would find insulting. Simple mechanical tricks worked surprisingly well, like looking for generalizations, imperative statements, and